STONE AGES OF CEYLON, 87 
Misconceptions with regard to Vedda anthropology have 
fostered this view,* and the occasional discovery of bits of 
worked, bottle-glass would appear corroborative.t 
To the best of my belief, however, there is no evidence at 
all to show that people of Vedda blood passed through a stone- 
age phase in this country. Moreover, if, as seems highly 
probable, the wild forest people, so recently extinct in this 
Island, were the last survivals of the Yakkas of antiquity, one 
can hardly doubt that they (the Veddas) were a degenerate and 
not a primitive race.t The Mahawansa makes it plain that 
more than twenty centuries ago the Yakkaswere highlycivilized. 
The fact that beneath the floors of Vedda caves stone tools 
are sometimes to be found throws little light upon their 
authorship ; nor is the apparent newness of the tools them- 
selves a telling argument in favour of modernity, since the 
crystal quartz, from which the vast majority were struck, is 
among the most imperishable of substances. Mr. Charles 
Hartley has shown that charcoal not uncommonly occurs in 
the “‘ chip-layer ”’ of the oe hills, Em) he takes this 
— eee ee —_ 
* The late Professor Tieehow, although a weieene in the probable 
autochthony of the Veddas, shows in his monograph upon them (first 
published by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin and afterwards 
translated—Jour. C. B., R. A. S., Vol. [X., No. 33, 1886) that anthro- 
pologically they are related to certain tribes of Southern India, and not 
to the Andamanese or to the aborigines of Australia, as some have 
thought. Churchward (‘“ The Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, 
London, 1913, p. 133) speaks unblushingly of ‘‘ The Viddas of Ceylon— 
The race that the Ainu drove out and destroyed inJapan. . . 
Parker, writing with some authority on the Veddas, says (“ Ancient 
Ceylon,” London, 1909, p. 20): “‘ Perhaps the strongest evidence of 
the country of their origin is their own tradition that this deity 
(a Hill God) came to Ceylon from Malawara-desa, ‘the Country of the 
hill-region,’ that is the Malayalam hills.”” If I remember rightly, even 
Huxley went amiss about the Veddas ; to the best of my recollection 
he says in effect that the internal evidence of their language shows 
them to be related to the aborigines of Australia. (I cannot verify 
this statement, as the Colombo Museum Library has no copy of that 
remarkable work “‘ Man’s Place in Nature,’ and my own copy is in 
England.) The Vedda language, of course, is little known. 
+ I was much puzzled when, in August, 1912, I found at Haputale 
a fragment of a bottle which had obviously been worked to an edge. 
The explanation of this interesting specimen is probably to be found 
in a statement made by Mr. John Pole (Ceylon ‘‘ Stone Implements,”’ 
Calcutta, 1913, p. 3) to the effect that Tamil coolies working on estates 
in Ceylon, some thirty years ago, fashioned ** rude glass razors ’’ from 
the bases of beer bottles. 
t See Chapter II. of Parker’s ** Ancient Ceylon,” and in particular 
the last section of it ‘‘ Evidence of Former Civilization ”’ (pp. 103-112). 


